I walked out of my kitchen on an overcast morning last week, feeling depressed, trying to think my way around the US election result somehow towards acceptance – or a totally different reality.
I walked to the garden, carrying a load of laundry. And perched on the top edge of a chair was a fat, fluffy laughing kookaburra. It looked at me, I looked at it. A large kingfisher with a long, dagger-shaped beak. The corners of its beak turn upwards so that it looks as though it is smiling slightly. Soft white feathers on its belly, iridescent blue opal spots on its brown wings.
Kookaburras are one of those animals that appear fairly often in cities but are rare enough, beautiful enough, that you never quite get used to seeing one. A visit from a kookaburra feels meaningful, as though the bird is trying to tell you something. Of course, the reason the kookaburra was actually in my garden was to visit my fish pond – “they plunge their beaks in the tide of darkness and dew / and fish up long rays of light,” Douglas Alexander Stewart writes – but for a moment I forgot that. For a moment, I forgot everything that wasn’t this visiting animal with its magically white feathers. I forgot the laundry and the election, I forgot to feel sorry for myself. I was outside my own mind, it felt like, for the first time in days.
A pair of Australian kookaburras. Photograph: Russell McPhedran/AP
I stepped back inside slowly and went into my daughter’s room, where she was still asleep. “Guess who’s outside?” I said, carrying her from her bed. The first time she used the word “frustrated” we were watching a kookaburra in the garden – she was frustrated that it wasn’t taking the piece of meat we had put out for it.
This time, by the time we were back outside, it had flown to the top of the laundry line. My daughter called my husband to come and see. The three of us tried to get closer and the bird flew over the fence.
It is this kind of encounter, I think, that makes elections feel bird-like to me – something is about to happen, the bird is about to fly away, and for a period of time before that, there are a number of possibilities.
In Mary Oliver’s The Kookaburras, she writes:
In every heart there is a coward and a procrastinator.
In every heart there is a god of flowers, just waiting
to stride out of a cloud and lift its wings.
The kookaburras, pressed against the edge of their cage,
asked me to open the door.
Years later I remember how I didn’t do it,
how instead I walked away.
It’s better to live in the world of possibilities, the world of choice, the world where something is about to, and can, change – where you might defy gravity, for example. It is better to live in the world where you don’t get used to certain things. “I see we have undervalued the kookaburra,” Stewart writes at the start of his poem. “They think they are waking the world, and I think so too.”
Helen Sullivan is a Guardian journalist. She is writing a book for Scribner Australia
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